Spreading Darkness

Hey Folks,

I’m just a retired English teacher who plays the ukulele and puts out a blog. My political experience consists of voting regularly, being a leader of my local teachers’ union, listening to the news, and reading. Yet, for years I have been overwhelmed with the feeling that I knew much more than the talking pundit-heads we see on the “news” shows reporting the “news” and interviewing “important” people.

This feeling has been aroused over and over again by the failure of highly-paid, supposedly experienced and intelligent media ginks to question comments and positions that even I could see were variously non-responsive, incomplete, misleading, mistaken, or outright lies. It is frustrating and enraging to observe.

For most of my life I’ve labored under the misconception that the media’s job, its sacred responsibility, was to ferret out the TRUTH – not to give all sides “equal time” – not to “entertain” – not to pump up viewership, not to “maintain access” to powerful manipulators – not to advance one’s career and salary – but to ferret out the TRUTH.

It turns out that at one time this was – at least officially on paper – the media’s responsibility. No more.

from:

CJR - Columbia Journalism Review

Voices

Closing Ethical Loopholes
By Gilbert Cranberg

Journalism ethics codes are filled with advice to be accurate and to tell the truth, but no official code obligates the press to tell the truth about the exaggerations and outright falsehoods it quotes. The American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Statement of Principles is typical: “Every effort must be made to assure that the news content is accurate, free from bias, and in context, and that all sides are presented fairly.” By omitting any explicit duty to inform readers that what they just read was erroneous, the code enables a news organization to be in compliance so long as bogus claims are reported accurately.

For years, the Associated Press Managing Editors Association rejected that view. The ethics code in place at least since 1974 declared, “The newspaper should background, with the facts, public statements that it knows to be inaccurate or misleading.” The passage was dropped when APME rewrote the code in 1994 to make it, as David Hawpe, editorial director of the Louisville Courier-Journal who was then ethics committee chairman, “vaguely” recalls, “more operational, and less a statement of principle.”

Given that hoodwinking has become virtually a way of public life, something like the defunct APME language deserves to be dusted off, copied widely, and conscientiously applied.

To be sure, now and then reporters or editors do insert timely correctives. A January 14 New York Times story, for instance, quoted Dick Cheney’s claim in a speech that the projected shortfall in Social Security “exceeds $10 trillion,” and added immediately, “But that figure refers to a calculation of the shortfall over what economists call ‘an infinite time horizon.’ The standard figure for the shortfall, used by the Social Security trustees, is $3.7 trillion over 75 years.”

Such follow-on is the exception. It needs to be commonplace. Of course, shoring up the ASNE code won’t make it so, but it is an important symbolic step. Unless news organizations develop the competence and will to correct the record, the press [and, thereby, the public] will continue to be hornswoggled by the politicians.


Gilbert Cranberg, former editor of The Des Moines Register’s opinion pages, was a longtime member of ASNE’s Ethics and Values Committee.

- Uke Man